7: How to get Traffic to your Site

Try and resist the temptation to start selling your site before it is ready.  Leave promotion until the site is  up and running, the design finalised and a dozen or so quality articles are up and published on your new site.

There are some very good reasons for this:

• Concentrate on one thing at a time.  A common mistake of home site builders is to jump around between all the different activities that help to build a hit website but not getting anything done well.  The Internet market place is much more crowded that it has ever been before and a half baked attempt just won’t cut it anymore.
• A half finished site will put early readers off.  You should treat every visitor as a valued reader and invest in retaining every single one of them.  Running a website is a numbers game, but gaining the required inertia to get going takes some effort.
• Get off to a good start with Google. When your site is first listed in Google it will jump around quite considerably.  You might even find yourself appearing on the first page for popular terms.   If your site is not up to scratch from the start then early visitors won’t hang around and by the time you sink to page 100 you will be facing an up hill struggle to get back on top.  Conversely, if you buy a domain and don’t plan to do anything with it, it is worth introducing it to Google right away.  This is because older domains are given some extra weighting in search results.

Guest Posting

A great way to promote a new blog is to guest post on existing blogs that are relevant to your site.  The blog owner gets a great original article written by yourself, you get the chance to showcase a quality piece of writing to a whole new audience and an all important link back to your site.  Not only will this link refer you visitors long into the future but it will also add weighting to your site in search ranking results.

Networking

Following on from guest posting, building long term relationships with other writers in your niche can be fantastically valuable.  When a small group of bloggers work together they can become a powerful group within a niche enabling you all to compete against some of the bigger more established operators.  Although it is tempting to think that you may be “losing” traffic to competing sites this is actually a short term view.  In the long run a strong network will grow together and as long as you respect each others material and keep linking to each others leading stories then you have nothing to worry about.  This won’t work if you blog posts are continually inspired by the other bloggers in your niche.  But if this is the case you will always be struggling for readers.  Lead, don’t follow.

Participating in Communities

Joining other communities is a great way to make a name for yourself.

Forums: Most of you will probably be members of many forums and active contributors to a selection of these.  These are a great way to establish your identity and build your brand and authority with others that share your interest.  Always be careful to respect the rules of the forum owner.  You don’t want to be labelled a spammer and kicked off before you have even started!  If the forum allows signature links then a simple link and some choice keywords can be enough.  After that you just need to make some great contributions and those that like what you say will find their way to your site.

Take some time to learn what is and isn’t acceptable, always be respectful, make sure you are adding something to the site.  And then when appropriate link back to your own site if you feel you have some content that is genuinely useful.  Unfortunately some forums are very protective over link posting fearing that everyone is out to steal their traffic or is robotic spammer.  It is of course up to all of us to practice good posting etiquette and show that link posting can be of great value to the communities we are interacting with.

Comments: Commenting on other blogs is very similar to participating in forum communities.  There are some further things to consider however.  Many blogs use the “no follow” tags which will mean that the links back to your site are not used by Google to calculate search engine rankings.  Don’t let this stop you from posting.  Comments are a fantastic way to get yourself heard and established as an expert in the field.  Only comment if you have something to say.  Don’t be the posters who turn up to every post and add “great article I will read this carefully”.  This won’t get you noticed, it won’t get people clicking through to your site.  Be the one who furthers the discussion, adds a new insight to the debate, offers an alternative view.  This will get you noticed for the right reasons.

Article Marketing

Article marketing is normally done as a back-link building exercise, but you might also find this technique brings traffic into your site.

Lets take an example, head over to hubpages and sign up now.  Go on, do it!  Web building is all about action so why not make this happen now – no excuses!  Go through the following steps and give yourself a pat on the back for doing something that has added real value to your portfolio.

• So, first off, sign up to the hubpages website, create a profile, fill it in and you are ready to start creating “hubs”.
• Now create your first hub article, this will ultimately rank in Google, provide you a backlink and will pass on traffic and Page Rank to your site.
• Pick a site that you are working on and would like to get some new traffic, because you know your topic well you will be able to pick a related subject where you can write a fresh 500-800 words straight off the top of your head.
• Use the opportunity to explore a new idea, get an opinion off your chest, have a rant, it doesn’t really matter – just make sure you can create a good deal of content and do it from your extensive knowledge of your niche.
• Add one link back to your site, there is no need to stuff the page, this will harm your articles chances of performing well on the hubpages site.
• Publish up the page and over time you will see your “hub score” improve and the traffic will begin to come.
• Repeat over and over again, the beauty of picking a topic you can write about naturally is that you can put out 500 words again and again on a variety of topics without having to perform continuous research.

Yes, this does take some work but it has a number of advantages.  You may also want to submit to other selected article sites as and when you feel you need to grow.  But remember this, there is no point promoting your website if there is nothing good on it to promote.  Create some decent content first and promote second.  Even if you concentrate on creating one amazing post and then spend the next week promoting it this is far better that marketing a site that has nothing on it, you are better off building up the site first.